A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece

I

Where are you planting this? Is it xorta—weed?’ And the old woman laughs up at me, whipping her donkey on down the rocky path ahead before I have time to answer. I hear her call her greeting to the many—and invisible—other occupants of the Greek landscape: ‘Herete!’ as she wends her way to the sea from her tiny demesne of olive and scrub. Her upright figure in black is like a needle, threading through a patchwork of fiercely owned and tended land that is as intimately known and impossible to ignore as the network of interrelated families in the village of Liapades, above us on the steep hill. All those who call back are owners, brothers, uncles, daughters, grandmothers and great-grandmothers of the land. And here, for the past thirty-five years or more, since my parents bought squares and triangles of this Mediterranean quilt, we have been a part of the landscape too.

What I am carrying is actually a pot of mint, a present for my mother and for the garden she has made under the house on the old terraces that go down to the grove. I’m hoping the mint will join the landscape; surprisingly, given the curly-leafed basil, plentiful chives and small forests of wild thyme, rosemary and sage that guard the flights of stone steps to the bay, there has never been mint here at Rovinia. Everything else is here, one might say. The hill across the narrow valley from our house is covered with one of the few remaining examples of autochthonous wood remaining on the island, a tangle of holm-oak, myrtle, white Mediterranean heath, viburnum, bay, laurel, arbutus and Judas tree; beyond, on the mountains above the Plain of Liapades, every herb of the eastern Mediterranean seems to grow, giving off a summery smell that is both healing and soporific. But neither sign nor scent exists of the iridescent green that proclaims the presence of mint. Of course, I know it’s lack of water that deprives us of that sharp taste in the tsatsiki, the local yoghurt mixed with sturdy cucumber from allotments up by the church; and of an unashamedly English mint sauce to go with the shoulder of lamb. It’s what you forget, when you walk in the Tuscan lushness of this hidden, untouched land on the west coast of the island of Corfu. Cypresses stand firmly Italian against a Quattrocento sky. Tiles on the roofs of the old houses left behind in the village in the scramble down to the sea are Venetian; crumbling, ochre and sun-baked to brown. It’s only too easy to forget, when winter rain is plentiful, the long season of drought. When it comes to comparisons with Italy, the island of Corfu lies across the Ionian Sea from the heel of the country, Calabria, a long way south of Tuscany. Can I really expect my pot of mint to take, in these conditions? Am I trying to do the equivalent of growing strawberries at the North Pole?

Time has a way of eliding here, making a constantly changing pattern of lives and beliefs, light and sombre against the background of an ever-changing sea.

How did we come to be here? Could it really be that a cruise round the Greek islands—a cruise run by Swan Hellenic, with on-board lectures by archaeologists and historians, stop-overs at little-known ports, and the sense of adventure and excitement of the trip—had so enthused my (by then) late middle-aged parents that they decided there and then to throw over everything and live in Corfu? And I? How did I come to be drawn to this place, after my first glimpse down the wooded valley when playing truant on a trip for a glossy magazine, insisting that a group of hot journalists come with me over a boulder-strewn hillside to make a first long appraisal of the spot? Did I sense I was part of a chain, going back millennia to the first inhabitants of a slice of this beautiful coast? Was it a feeling that, despite the Venetian name, ‘Rovinia’—meaning (gloomily) ruin, and causing friends to raise eyebrows and throw hands in the air when news broke of the plan to live in Corfu—there had been a great deal more in distant days than the crumbling lime-kiln along the path from the high-water mark and the traces of grey stone on abandoned cultivated land, long ago swallowed by the Mediterranean jungle on the hill? How did the site of the house my father would build, fifty yards above the bay, come to be decided on with such uncanny prescience?

For, as we sit here now, on the stone terrace above the bay, we realise, for the hundredth time, that the choice of site was extraordinary indeed. It’s the autumn equinox, 21st September, and the mountain across the sea that unfurls before us—we call the mountain the Monkey’s Head, for it is round and brown and intelligent-looking, and guards the entrance to the famous bay of Paleokastritsa—now wears an unusual piece of headgear. It is 7 p.m. and the red sun sets midway over the Monkey’s Head—just above, in fact, a parting, a limestone scar, which runs down the centre of the skull. Far below, on rocks where foam shoots up, a white peacock’s tail in the backlash of a southerly gale far out to sea, the light from the lighthouse will flash off and on, warning the ships of danger once darkness comes down.

Not now, though: not yet. This is a moment we savour each year at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the few seconds when the sun sinks into the ape’s cranium, dead-centre, and we see not the face of a monkey but of a god. We know in those brief moments that the house we have built is, by an inexplicable coincidence, straight in the path of the sun. The sun is, invariably, red as blood when it disappears on those two equinoctial occasions—and, despite all the scepticism and sophistication of our age, we can’t help shivering at the thought of sacrifice and ritual, of Greek tragedy and rebirth, and of the secrets that lie buried in the groves and on the shifting stony and sandy beaches of the bay.

Then it’s suddenly dark. Scarlet feathers, all that remain of the monkey’s hat, stream out across a sky washed with clouds of black and indigo. We’re holding our drinks, a little embarrassed perhaps by the sense of having been plunged into the ancient world and then pulled from it again—and we turn to each other, and to the lighted sitting room beyond the verandah. Someone brings out whisky, and ice; and in a twilight going so fast it’s barely possible to see the terracotta pot where the mint grows, on the balustrade above the trees and shrubs on the hillside, I pick a sprig and add it to a drink. Yes, the mint has accepted its new home, on the west coast of the island of Corfu. But it will only live here if tended like a precious plant; it refuses to spread and naturalise. And now, as I look down in dusk at the rings and rusty covers of the seven wells we dug when we first came here to live, I wonder that I ever thought this water-craving herb would settle down with us at all.

It’s a hot day, and the sun comes in through the long, dusty windows of the estate agent’s office and makes a ring of rainbow bubbles around the surface of the tiny cups of metriou coffee on the desk between us. It’s an indispensable part of the negotiations, which Pandelios’s black-skirted, white-bloused young secretary seems to serve with the same air of solicitude that I remember at a monastery on the pinnacles of Meteora: a thimble of coffee; a loukoumi, pale rose-water Turkish delight powdered with fine sugar; a tall glass and a short one, with water and ouzo respectively. She could be the daughter of the papas I still see in my mind’s eye when, with a friend (and refusing the offer of being hauled up in a basket to the summit), we had climbed the hundreds of steps and entered the dark, incense-haunted church and gone through into the high, vaulted library. With her dark eyes and downcast expression, she could be an icon, a Byzantine Madonna captured in a painted haze of gold sunshine. But before I can romanticise any further, Pandelios the estate agent has stretched across me to hand the little white china cups to my mother and father, and the conversation continues where it had broken off with the arrival of the sweet, thick metriou.

‘Anna Georgiadis is holding out for more,’ Pandelios says. His bushy hair, reddish and receding at the temples, makes him look like a pantomime lion. ‘It’s a vital part of the property, as you know, so I’m afraid you’ll have to take her terms.’

‘Very well,’ comes my father’s answer. ‘We don’t want anyone to be unhappy there—and her parcel of land does lie right in the middle of the grove. As we said before, we want the right of way down from the village to continue—in fact we wouldn’t dream of stopping anyone from bringing their sheep down to graze anywhere on the land’—and he turns to my mother, who nods in confirmation. ‘The only way the fishermen can get down to the sea is by going on the path just behind the house we plan to build,’ my father goes on. ‘And we wouldn’t contemplate blocking the path when we own those stremata [acres] at the top of the hill.’

Pandelios scratches his chin and looks business-like, but I can tell he is pleased with our wish to leave undisturbed the way of life of the Corfiots in this remote part of the west coast. There have been stories—we are actually only to hear them later—of the foolhardy foreigner who blocked access to the well on his land, only to find the well blocked up with cement the next time he came to the island to enjoy his property. And stories of hauntings, of the patron saint, St Spiridon, displeased at an incomer’s reluctance to share amenities that have belonged to the local people for as long as there has been a St Spiridon in the great gold catafalque in the town’s church. But at the time of our meeting with the estate agent, we knew none of this. We just knew it didn’t make sense to demand privacy when the seashore belongs to everyone—and is anyway never short of men pushing out their boats or dragging them up the beach again. The landscape, however empty it may look, has as many denizens as a tapestry depicting hidden animals in a forest alive with huntsmen and spears. In Greece, you’re never alone, and when I put in my contribution—saying the word for private is idiotikos, and surely there must be a good reason for that—everyone laughs, though the agent and his demure secretary laugh a trifle uncertainly. Will we really leave the local population to their old ways, which involve a 4 a.m. trudge down the rock path and on to the shingle, shouting as the boats are rolled out over logs, voices echoing across the water and ricocheting back to the valley we are about to buy? Do we know what we’re letting ourselves in for? Smart folk from Athens would be likely to try and restrict the ways and livelihoods of country and fishing people by building private marinas and swimming pools. Why not us? ‘I don’t want a fence at the high-tide mark where the beach goes into the grove,’ my mother says when Pandelios makes a suggestion that public and private land should be separated by the erection of boards and notices. ‘It should all flow—one into the other, not shut off at all.’ And the agent looks in amazement and relief at these two xenoi, the foreigners who want all to make use of the land near the sea below Liapades.

Of course, that was then. As I daydream (for I’m not involved in the financial side of this new life-plan of my parents, and at the time—the early 1960s—I had no idea how strong a part the place would play in my own life), I look out of the window on a typical street scene of Corfu town. Tall Venetian houses, in faded watermelon colours, lean like guests at a party, slightly jaded by their long years of civilised enjoyment. The street is narrow, and a woman walks along with a bag of small artichokes and a carrier bursting with minute fish, a kind of whitebait it seems, which glint silver in the spring sunlight. I imagine it’s her midday meal, for I know offices close at lunchtime and don’t reopen until at least five in the evening, the afternoon idled away in the sacred Greek siesta. I see a table, a balcony, a blind pulled low, as it is already hot at this time of year by one o’clock. A dish is on the table, in a darkened room just inside from the balcony with its ornamental railing. Elegant and curved, this is in all probability a relic of the French occupation of Corfu. In the dish are small artichokes, to be eaten whole, with a side plate of minuscule broad beans, startlingly green due to the removal of the outer skin, the bean being gripped between finger and thumb.

‘I will speak to Anna Georgiadis and explain she may also bring her goats to the grove,’ says Pandelios, while I feel my parents control their reaction to the prospect: sheep add to the charming rural idyll under the olives, but goats? ‘So, unless there are any problems, I believe we have discussed all there is to discuss,’ Pandelios concludes. (Of course there will be problems. But, for now, we pretend all is well.) Pandelios glances out of the window, and I see in his eyes the pleasure of anticipating the coming meal. I hope for him that he will have the new season’s artichokes, so tender the inner thistle doesn’t need to be cut out. And I find myself wishing now for a frittura of the little fish.

‘We’ll have lunch at the harbour, shall we?’ my parents say, after we have said goodbye to Pandelios and arranged to meet again next week, to explore the necessity for a foreign company to be formed in order to buy land in Corfu. I agree, and accompany them, as entranced by this new direction in all our lives as they so clearly are. But before we go I listen to Pandelios’s last story—about the tradition of the youngest son of a Greek family inevitably being the recipient of the poorest land as his inheritance: shallow and gravel-choked, with brackish water, away from the good agricultural areas and near the sea. ‘Yet this may all change for the youngest sons,’ Pandelios says, as if recounting a fairy-tale that he senses is destined for a new ending. ‘When people come who want to live by the sea,’ he says thoughtfully, looking at us, an English family with no apparent need to uproot and come to live in Corfu, ‘then, I think, all may very well change.’ And he smiles and waves to us, and we walk down the street. I hadn’t liked to ask, in the halting demotic I had learnt a couple of years before, whether our good agent was himself the youngest son in his family.

The island of Corfu is sixty miles long and thirty miles wide at its widest. The mountains—particularly Pantokrator with its Olympian splendour—give an illusion of scale to the island that is quite at odds with the reality. Corfu looks out at Albanian mountains to the east, and across the sea to Italy in the west, with mountain ranges, again, giving the sense of a land of limitless proportions. Giants or trolls must once have lived here, one thinks when morning makes of the mountains a blue-mauve hugeness along the edges of the plain between Liapades and the eastern side of the island, the Plain of Ropa; or when evening pencils the mountains black, as if they had turned to sleeping giants themselves. Space, as well as time, is unreliable here: the prevalence of mountains makes for winding roads, corkscrews that draw the clear air like wine from the necks of valleys and gorges as one goes up and up, and then drops down. It can take longer to travel five miles, in Corfu, than to drive across a prairie or an entire county in England—the Somerset Levels, say, or the East Anglian fens.

So what are the size and scale of the land we have bought, in this land of endless miles and long-distance journeys to the nearest mountain village? How do we measure the depth and width of Rovinia, how do we throw in the unchartable sea? Will we feel cramped or generously accommodated in our new home? Will we have the sense of perching on a ledge, if we hack out rock from the hillside and build there—or will it seem as if the house has always been waiting for us to build it, just as wide and long as it was intended by nature to